On why it would be quite wrong to laugh about Prof Chris Turkey and his Antarctic Ship of Fools

So asks an Australian activist named Alex White in the Guardian and I think he makes a very good point. Clever people who understand how to think critically and who have scientific evidence on their side can be very arrogant and judgemental. Sometimes they even laugh cruelly at the afflicted, as they have been during the Christmas holidays over the plight of poor Professor Chris Turkey and his so-called Ship of Fools expedition in which he and his crack team of climate scientists set off to conduct vital research work about global warming in the Antarctic only to be trapped by unseasonally thick ice.

The problem with irresponsible denialist journalism like this is that while it may convey the literal truth about Professor Turkey's expedition, it ignores the broader emotional truth. Yes, it may be the case that if you concentrate on superficial details like factual evidence, you could construct a narrative in which Professor Turkey emerged from this episode looking – as denialist filth might term it, shortly before they were fed to a cage full of 120 ravening dogs – like a prize prat. For example, a denialist filthtard bourgeois capitalist running dogfood lackey might note that both in the Antarctic and the Arctic ice coverage appears to be increasing rather than decreasing, thus driving a Titanic-sized iceberg hole through Catastrophic Anthropogenic Warming Theory; that this frivolous tourist jaunt (or scientifically vital research trip, depending on whether you read the reports published in the left-liberal media before or after the project came unstuck) will cost the Australian taxpayer (possibly the UK one too if the expedition's co-sponsor Exeter University picks up its share of the tab) hundreds of thousands of dollars; that this was essentially a propagandistic exercise, not a scientific one, as can be noted for example in the BBC's and the Guardian's decision to dispatch reporters on the expedition (can you imagine them giving similarly fawning coverage to an Australian expedition led by, say, Prof Ian Plimer or Prof Bob Carter?) and the subsequent desperate attempts at face-saving by the Guardian's Senior Environment Commissar James Randerson.

But all this is to miss the point about the broader – and far more significant – emotional truth about climate change.

"Climate change" is the greatest threat mankind has faced in the history of the universe because all the nice, caring people say it is and because even if it isn't technically a major, proven or unprecedented threat well it kind of feels like it ought to be and therefore we shouldn't look too carefully at the actual evidence. (Multiple H/T below to Bishop Hill)

Rather, we should take a leaf out the book of people like former chief scientist Sir David King, who recently suggested on BBC Radio 5 Live that we are currently subject to more extreme weather events than before (even though there is no scientific evidence to support this).

And people like current chief scientist Sir John Beddington, who made similar claims on the Today programme (even though, again, there is no scientific evidence to support this).

And people like Adam Boulton of Sky News. Despite suffering the handicap of being neither a current nor a former chief scientist, and despite evidently having given the minutiae of the climate change debate about as much careful consideration as you would, say, the details of the terms and conditions when you sign up for a free iPhone app, this has not prevented him from understanding exactly what the sensible, reasonable position is in a column in the Sunday Times.

Last week the journal Nature published a paper reporting that the Earth’s climate was more susceptible to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought, and predicting global temperature could go up by 4C this century. True, as the tireless climate change “realist” Lord Lawson points out, the global temperature so far has not risen as much as some of the direst predictions but, equally, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded last September it was “unequivocal” that global warming was taking place because of human actions. The panel said its view was supported by 97% of scientific research.

That's right, Adam Boulton. Well done! No one, anywhere that matters has poured ridicule on that 97 per cent figure. Yes, it IS very important to put danger quotes around "realist" when applied to Lord Lawson, even if you are utterly incapable of producing the remotest scintilla of evidence to demonstrate that he's not a realist really. Yes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is indeed the gold standard of all climate change research and knowledge, and is always worth quoting as an irrefutable authority for no one anywhere has ever found it to be flawed. Yes, you are totally forgiven for the ignorant understatement of that phrase "so far has not risen as much as the direst predictions" [a more correct phrase, you should be aware, would have been "so far has not risen even as much as the least dire predictions"], because, as you rightly perceive, the climate change debate is an issue of absolutely no consequence to anyone and therefore can be covered with the same glib insouciance you might apply had you been invited to cover your first ever football match and you weren't sure whether Chelsea were the ones in the blue or red but what the hell, it's only a game, eh?